Re: GPOS support available!

[David Turner]

Hi Werner,

> 
> Dear friends!
> 
> I can finally announce that full GPOS support is available! GSUB,
> GPOS, and GDEF support now complies to OpenType 1.2.
>
This is excellent news ! Congratulations. Now, we'll have to make a
new release (FreeType 1.4 ?). Seems that 1.3.1 wasn't the last one
as said on the web page after all ;-)

Also, do we all agree to switch to the FreeType 2 design after this
release ? I think it'd be a good thing if you could convert the
current OpenType Layout extensions into a "pseudo-driver" for FT2.

In the current crop, there already is a pseudo-driver called
"SFNT". It doesn't support font files directly, but provides
routines used to manage the tables found in all "SFNT" font
files, which means normal TrueTypes, TrueType GX, OpenType
CFF/Type2 fonts and probably more (if we get a new font format ;-)
It is located in "freetype2/src/sfnt"

The TrueType driver detects the "sfnt" pseudo-driver and uses it
to load and manage various "common" tables (like Postscript glyph
names, embedded bitmaps, charmaps, etc..). It is located in
"freetype2/src/truetype" and its code only really deals with
glyph loading and bytecode interpretation.

In the near future, the OpenType CFF/Type2 driver (we really need
a better name for this format), will go to "freetype2/src/type2"
and will use too the pseudo-sfnt driver. Its code will be specialized
to reading the content of the CFF/Type2 tables in the font file.

I suggest writing another pseudo-driver for the OpenType Layout
features. It would provide an API similar to the one that is already
there for FT 1.x. We could place it in "freetype2/src/otlayout"
Would you find this meaningful ? :-)

Best Regards,

- David